Brutal Object constructs a narrative of multiple protagonists, consisting of buildings, characters and objects. The work engages with three different architectural settings: A Brutalist tower (in the process of being stripped); a conserved Tudor museum; a contemporary dwelling.

The recorded voice within the narrative navigates the physicality of each setting through the dismantlement, relocation and repurposing of objects and matter that occurs as a result of demolition, salvage and conservation of the city fabric. The value system of each setting is revealed as the construction and deconstruction of their histories is staged and performed within a fourth setting. The fourth setting, a space apart, is characterised by sound, light, text and a three dimensional element. A geometric structure and its shadow-lines stage the protagonists from the narrative. Scaleless and cut loose in time and space, the form and its shadow are both devised from the inter-relations of the protagonists and offer up a spatial narrative structure through which the protagonists move.

‘Rogue Game Replay’ was exhibited as part of the programme ‘Playing with Space’ curated by Lawrence Bradby. The installation, a configuration of sports markings and monitors with moving image loops, is articulated in relation to the architecture of the gallery space. The footage presents the simultaneous playing of three sports in a multi-use sports hall with markings overlaid.

‘Playing with Space’ celebrates artists’ interventions into urban space, showing ways by which the presence of the human body can critique architecture. The event presented fifteen performance works through short films, two live performances and one spatial installation by artists from Europe, USA, Central America and Africa. The event tour included Norwich Art Centre, The Live Art Development Agency and firstsite, Colchester.

The rider performs a donut as a perfectly shaped ‘O’ in an urban location. By rotating the motorbike around the front wheel in a continuous motion he burns a thick circular mark in rubber on the tarmac. Double O focuses on the illicit and fleeting activity of burning circular skid marks within the city and translates it through a spatial installation and video loop into an endless silent action governed by the logics of the gallery space.

Double O intervenes within Doing Things Separately Together as both a drawing and articulation of the city at the scale of 1:1

Commissioned by the Arnolfini to work in collaboration with the curators as a central thematic cluster to The Promise, we devised a conceptual framework that aimed to explore the layered reality of the city as a shared and contested territory where both the past and the present co-exist. Thirty map layers were created in dialogue with specialists and groups within Bristol, relating to the way given systems, structures and spaces within the city are both occupied and transformed by its inhabitants. Subjects range from the presence and locations of CCTV and surveillance, the geological landscape underpinning but often hidden from city life, to sites of social and political unrest. Each map brings together three separate layers of information, normally disassociated, to mobilize their associative and contingent relations and offer up alternative re-presentations of the city. The maps, both anecdotal and statistical, seek to reveal the ways in which we simultaneously identify, claim, circumscribe and imagine the space of the city over time.

Event: A talk-show line-up of invited protagonists choose and read passages from science fiction to critical texts according to the rules of an MC. Read in rapid-fire format the spoken texts imagine and attend to the ‘architecture’ of utopia. A line-up table is transformed by a graphic framework, a page from the book Beyond Utopia rescaled and now occupied by readers and objects staging the table as a discursive territory. Each event will be hosted by a partner organization tying into and developing networks of utopian thinkers in the organisation’s locality. Selected video clips of the readings from each event are uploaded onto an online site forming an anthology of the Utopian talk-show line-up series. The anthology will evolve, acting as a testimony to the collective desire to imagine difference. The structure of the event is inspired by the Wooster Group’s ‘L.S.D. (…Just the High Points…)’ 1984-5.

Navigating the Game used the system of gallery text applied as vinyl on the wall to present the solo exhibition ‘Rogue Game’ at Spike Island structured as three ‘scenes’. Each scene comprised of a short text and a gallery layout presented as a game plan with titles of the works comprising the ‘scene’ annotated. The fiction is inspired by extracts from Gummo in Harmony Korine, Collected Screenplays 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002).

Materials: Two editing stations (one with Atem mixer), two editors, an occasional commentator, two wall projections, two suspended screens and three tables of Dexion and MDF, chairs, screensaver on editing station and resource table monitors, three TV floor cube monitors, three DVD players, cables, white tape.

Beyond Utopia examines the space beyond utopia’s concern with the primacy of the single idea. Set at the intersection of the architectural imagination, the reality of urban development, critical writing and fiction, the publication creates a space of speculation on the architecture of utopia. The publication is centred on a screenplay by Warren and Mosley of a film never intended to be made. Writers and artists from various fields have been invited to fasten onto concepts raised in the screenplay and to develop their propositional nature. The essays and works contributed both contextualize and critique utopian thinking, ultimately locating utopia as a critical tool with which to speculate and reveal the limits of our present reality.

Artist Brandon LaBelle invited us to participate in a project he was developing for an evolving and touring exhibition. He writes: ‘The project is developed as a conversation between sound and architecture. Working with architects, designers and artists from around the world, I sent them three audio recordings of my apartment in Berlin. Attempting to sound out the space, the recordings document the ambient, material and dimensional aspects of the apartment. The participants were then given the task of making a physical model of the apartment by using the sounds as their only source of information. In this way, a process of translation and interpretation developed, incorporating an understanding, however factual or fantastical, of the auditory into rendering a spatial form.’ Our response to Brandon’s sound recordings was to create a model and accompanying text, shown here as it is published in the catalogue.

The event ‘Rogue Game, First Play’ and show ‘Rogue Game Replay’ were commissioned by Casco Utrecht in relation to Can Altay’s exhibition ‘COHAB: an assembly of spare parts’. Extending the concerns of ‘COHAB’ the event and show explore concerns of inhabitation and territorial negotiation.

‘Rogue Game, First Play’ is an ongoing series of hybrid games. The proposition of Rogue Game is to simultaneously play three or more games marked out on a multi-purpose sports pitch. A struggle between three games and their players ensues; known rules are exchanged for new ever-changing rules and the seed of a new game or gaming instinct is put forward.

‘Rogue Game Replay’ stages a meeting ground of hybridized relations and play between the logic and systems of the sports arena, the exhibition space and the office at Casco. Within the exhibition setting the superimposed territories, rules and functions of each layer are negotiated and strategies for co-habitation outside the confines of the sports hall are illuminated.

Seek out an indoor sports hall with markings of at least three different game courts or pitches overlaid. Enlist teams of players for each game. On court assemble the players dressed to indicate team and game. On the whistle, simultaneously all games begin. Each game is played for its official duration.

Within the exhibition setting the superimposed territories, rules and functions of the sports arena, the exhibition space and office of Casco are negotiated for inhabitation. A centre section of the multipurpose sports hall, at real scale is folded into the space of Casco, bringing into the space the architecture of the game, creating new thresholds and territories for the office workers to adhere to and play to. Further overlay and inter-play between Rogue Game and the exhibition and office settings occurs through the screening of Rogue Game play/action uploaded as screensavers and relayed to monitors within the abstracted court setting. The mediated and frenetic action of play heard in the sounds of whistles, shouts and squeaky shoes intermittently interrupts office work and defines a new gaming arena.

For The Showroom commission Rogue Game took the form of an off-site event and an installation within the gallery in the context of Can Altay’s show, ‘The Church Street Partners Gazette’. A disused sports pitch within the neighbourhood of Church Street, London is reopened for a performance of Rogue Game. The reopening of this pitch for a one-off game involved the painting of the court lines. Communities of players local to the Borough of Westminster are invited to meet and play Rogue Game. The game brings together three different sports staged simultaneously on the same pitch, each game played according to its own rules. Through the simple overlaying of time the event throws the players into unknown territories within established frameworks for play. Known rules are exchanged for new ever-changing rules. Rogue Game proposes another kind of logic for how we might occupy space and how through the informal possibilities of play resist or destabilize accepted boundaries of territory, use and behaviour.

‘Rogue Game Re-play’, a 3 channel installation is installed in the gallery. The footage of ‘Rogue Game, First Play’ interspersed with colour frames stages the court arena as a place for new and renewed partnerships between players extending the show’s concerns for partnership, boundaries, transformation and community.

Seek out an indoor sports hall with markings of at least three different game courts or pitches overlaid.
Enlist teams of players for each game.
On court assemble the players dressed to indicate team and game.
On the whistle, simultaneously all games begin.
Each game is played for its official duration.